The NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity (CHI) is a Trans-NIH initiative whose mission is to provide a collaborative resource to enable high-dimensional multiplex immune phenotyping for NIH clinical studies. This is accomplished through a focused team for scientific input, advanced technologies, and informatics support to better understand human immune function and pathophysiology.
The CHI operates in three modes: collaborative scientific studies, scientific technology development, and fee-for-service (FFS). Collaborative studies aim to integrate several of CHI’s technologies for comprehensive phenotyping and include substantial contributions by CHI to study design, data analysis, and funding. Collaborative studies will be selected competitively from a call for proposal which is announced multiple times per year. Scientific study proposals can also be selected as a technology development project if the aims of the proposal don't match the criteria to be selected as a collaborative scientific study. Alternatively, a subset of the technologies at CHI is available to any NIH users on a FFS basis, where CHI can generate data for a fee to cover costs, but study design and data analysis are the responsibility of the customer.